Letter From America // The Proclaimers

Libby made a carrot cake for her work. It had cream cheese icing which is delicious but once the icing was on we decided it needed something else to make it look more exciting. We didn't have any sugar paste icing to make an orange carrot so I made a stencil and we sieved cinnamon through it to make it quite plainly a carrot cake.


I was quite chuffed with my stenciling.

There's been a very detailed carrot cake in the past and this was made using the same recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery book.

Judy and the Dream of Horses // Belle and Sebastian

Jonny and I have returned from a lovely weekend in Sussex with friends. The weather wasn't amazing, but we managed to get to Brighton for an afternoon, go for a long walk on Sunday, and Jonny and I went horse riding for a little bit on Monday. That was an interesting experience. Jonny got lumped with a bit of a rubbishly stubborn horse, but it was nice to go out onto the forest.
It's our 4th anniversary today. Gosh. It sort of makes my head hurt thinking about it, mostly because I feel old. But can't moan too much, as I got given the best present ever - a hot water bottle with Moomin on!! It's completely gorgeous and made me cry a little bit.
Jonny got the horse ride (maybe not the best present ever), a mushy CD and as requested, a massive carrot cake.

I used (again) the Hummingbird Bakery book. As we were going away with Becci I replaced the walnuts with tea-soaked sultanas, which I thought was a fantastic move. It ended up with juicy little explosions, though I'm not sure that the tea taste lasted enough.
The recipe required 300 grams of grated carrot. 'Pah, thats not much,' thought I, with no idea really how much it would be, 'I can do that by hand.'
I ended up covering the kitchen and myself in carrot. Next time I will get that super whizzy attachment for the blender out for that bit.

I was also wise enough to know that while the recipe said the mix should be baked in 3 parts that I could bake it in one. And not line the tin properly.
I really don't know what was going on in my brain on Friday.
So once I'd made it all and put it in my unlined tin, I realised that it was a humungous cake and would probably take a couple of hours to cook. So I lined the outside of the tin like you would for fruit cake and tied it with parcel string.

It was big.

The string must have caught fire at some point early on as I checked the cake and it all looked a bit black on one edge. Anyway, it cooked in about 2 hours as predicted and the top got sliced off and sampled and then I had it on my lap for the journey to Sussex. Nice and warm.
I iced it that evening with cream cheese frosting, and tiny sugar paste bunnies and petals. There was also a big bunny eating blossom on top in homage to the blossom eating bunny Jonny and I once saw on a walk together. That bit wasn't so great though, as I can't draw, and my brother drew me a rabbit on wheels and my mum drew me a bit of a dodgy but satisfactory bunny, that didn't quite work in sillhouette.

But it was very tasty, and the four of us managed to demolish it in not very long. Sometimes we even had it for breakfast; a good reason to get out of bed early while on holiday.